As
recently as 2000, married 25- to 34-year-olds outnumbered their never-married
peers by a margin of 55% to 34%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2015,
the most recent year for which data are available, those estimates had almost
reversed, with never-marrieds outnumbering marrieds by 53% to 40%. Young
Americans have quickly become wary of marriage.

Why is this happening?

Regnerus dismisses the argument that men are less desirous
of conjugal bliss because they are less able to support wives and families. To that we should add that women might be less willing to marry men who are
insolvent. This argument is not one way.

He continues to say that most men do want to marry
eventually, just not now. Today they prefer to wait until they are around 30… a
significant increase from the historical norm.

Regnerus examines the argument that men believe that marriage
is a bad deal. One might ask how many women want to become wives and then to
ask how many women want to marry when they are in their twenties. Even if most women do want eventually to marry, many of them today do not want to marry young. Again, we
ought to consider the possibility that the decline of marriage has multiple causes.

Be that as it may, Regnerus offers his own hypothesis. Men
are not getting married because they can get all the sex they want on the
cheap. So, why get married and feel like they are paying for it. While that
last sentence follows reasonably from the first, Regnerus does not quite put it
that way. If bachelorhood offers cheap sex, doesn’t that entail that marriage
offers more costly sex?

Were we to examine the implications of having a lot of cheap sex, we would
also notice that… sorry to have to say it… in this life you often get what
you pay for.

Regnerus does not say so in his article, but I will add that the cheap sex movement began began in the 1960s with the
call for free love. Apparently, once love is free fewer and fewer people are
willing to pay for it. But this assumes that you think that free love and free
sex are the same thing? Besides, the Regnerus argument does not aim at free
sex. It argues for the influence of cheap sex. When what used to be free is now
cheap, maybe we are making progress.

Regnerus offers this argument:

For
American men, sex has become rather cheap. As compared to the past, many women
today expect little in return for sex, in terms of time, attention, commitment
or fidelity. Men, in turn, do not feel compelled to supply these goods as they
once did. It is the new sexual norm for Americans, men and women alike, of
every age.

What caused this transformation? Regnerus says it began with
birth control:

This
transformation was driven in part by birth control. Its widespread adoption by
women in recent decades not only boosted their educational and economic
fortunes but also reduced their dependence on men. As the risk of pregnancy
radically declined, sex shed many of the social and personal costs that once
encouraged women to wait.

One needs to add that many women also came to believe that
marriage was an oppressive institution. They did not really want any part of
the classical marriage. Why marry a woman who does not want to be a wife? Why marry a woman who wants you to become a househusband. Could this be part of the issue, too?

And then there is the omnipresence of porn. Apparently, women in porn videos
never say No:

Online
porn has made sexual experience more widely and easily available too. A laptop
never says no, and for many men, virtual women are now genuine competition for
real partners. In the same survey, 46% of men (and 16% of women) under 40
reported watching pornography at some point in the past week—and 27% in the
past day.

Porn is ubiquitous and it is free. True enough, it can and
has been used to satisfy sexual cravings, but there is more to life than
satisfying sexual cravings. Men gain no prestige and no status for watching
porn. If they have nothing but porn in their lives, their prom or homecoming dates might be
their hands. If so, the bros are not going to think you are a stud. I am not going to say that these men are missing out on the joy of a
relationship, but I will say that they lose status for being unattached, for
not having dates.

Some people have argued that pornography is degrading to
women. Might it be that the more women are pornified, the more they feel that
they must compete with porn stars through sexting, the less they seem to be
marriage material.

In this context, let’s not forget the influence of young men’s
mothers. They, above all other people, will look seriously askance at a young
woman who engages in sexting and hooking up.

Given one singular momentous event that occurred this week,
we must mention that the Playboy Philosophy espoused by Hugh Hefner played a role in the way men saw their relationships with women. Hefner’s
promotion of decadence for the masses told men that they did not need to shoulder the
responsibilities that accompany serious relationships. As my friend Susan
Brownmiller pointed out in the New York Times, Hefner relieved men of the
responsibility to be breadwinners. He was not the only one who disparaged the
role of breadwinner, but certainly he was influential. Hefner lived his
life like a pasha with a harem.

With his passing, the media world has arisen en masse to
praise him as a champion of women’s rights and the first amendment.

And you were wondering why our culture is in decline.

Anyway, when we are calculating the advantages that men gain
from having lots of cheap sex, we cannot honestly overlook the risks. Among
them, the STD risk. The New York Times reports on the latest from the Centers
for Disease Control. Given that 110 million Americans now have an STD, at least
we know that they did not get it from porn. One suspects that they got it from Tinder:

Chlamydia
is the most common S.T.D., and the number of cases rose 4.7 percent from 2015
to 2016. The increases occurred nationwide; rates were highest in the South and
lowest in the Northeast.

Chlamydia
is usually asymptomatic, and the number of reported cases may have grown in
part because of newer, more sensitive screening techniques.

Adolescents
and young adult women have the highest rates of chlamydia: one survey found
that 9.2 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 were infected, as were 8.0 percent of
women aged 20 to 24.

And also:

From
2015 to 2016, gonorrhea infections increased 22.2 percent among men and 13.8
percent among women, the C.D.C. reported. Almost 92 percent of cases are in
people 15 to 44 years old.

And finally:

The
rate of primary and secondary syphilis in 2016 is the highest it has been since
1993, and it increased among both men and women from 2015 to 2016. Men account
for almost 90 percent of cases, and most are among men who have sex with men.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Since it’s Friday, it’s time for
an advice column. To my eye, New York Magazine’s weekly offerings pale next to
a letter that was sent to The Nation. (via Maggie’s Farm)

It was written by a woman who
calls herself a Marxist-Feminist Slut. It shows us what happens to your mind
when it is invaded and occupied by an ideology. Worse yet, it shows us the
obstacles you face when you decide to politicize your personal life. That is,
when you decide that your personal life, your romantic life must fulfill the
terms of your pseudo-religion. And, to top it off, what happens when
reality does not seem to be fulfilling your ideologically driven expectations?

You will probably feel a certain
quantity of pathos for our Marxist-Feminist Slut. You would be right to do so.
After all, she is sacrificing her life to a stupid idea. If she learned this in
an indoctrination mill of a college, she should get a refund.

She addresses her letter to
columnist Liza Featherstone:

I’m a 32-year-old woman who would like to have kids
and a life partner in the not-so-distant future. And lucky me! I’ve recently
started dating an excellent candidate. But I can’t even pretend to think it’s
possible (or desirable) to have sex with just one person for the rest of my
life or even, frankly, for a few years.

Monogamy feels antithetical to the type of feminism
and anticapitalism I subscribe to. I am repulsed by the idea of being a man’s
property. Also, monogamy—like capitalism—requires us to believe in a false
scarcity: that we have to struggle for every little bit and that everything we
gain comes at someone else’s expense. The kind of liberatory future I’d like to
see is one of abundance and generosity and sharing. One of the few places we
can experiment with that now is in our love lives.

But ALL the decent men I’ve dated are really opposed
to open relationships, while the men I’ve slept with who say they fancy the
idea don’t ever stick around long enough for the “relationship” part of an open
relationship.

This leaves me feeling like once I find a partner,
the options are: 1) cheating (crummy and unethical, also a big anxiety-inducing
headache); 2) waiting for the mythical “one” who will magically make me never
attracted to anyone else (I’m fairly certain this is a hoax); or 3) retire from
my glorious days as a loud, proud slut and gradually wither away inside as I
suffocate one of the parts of my life, personality, and politics I cherish
most. Please tell me there is another option out there.

As
I said, you will feel sorry for MFS. She is living the ideology and
she is discovering that it was all one big fat lie. She is looking for a
polyamorous relationship, one where she can cheat at will, and she discovers
that the “decent” men she has dated reject it. She has also discovered that the
men who are happy to use her for sex have no interest in a relationship. It takes a Women's Studies course to obscure that truth.

She has shown us that we should not expect our
lives to conform to some idiot ideology. Unfortunately, she does not have a
clue about why a man who loved her would not want her to sleep around. She
calls such men “decent” and the word pops out to us as the last living remnant
of her moral sense.

What about Liza Featherstone’s advice? To be honest with you—and
of course I am always honest—it is fairly solid. Surely, it is better than
what we tend to find in New York Magazine columns.

OK, I admit that Featherstone does not question the fact that MFS has politicized her life to fulfill a half-assed ideology. Given the
venue, The Nation, she probably does not have that much latitude. To be honest,
most therapists would take the woman’s query at face value and would not
question her beliefs. It would be like questioning someone’s religious beliefs—there
is nothing to be gained by trying to undermine someone’s religion.

If our Marxist-Feminist Slut is going to learn the error of
her ways, she is not going to learn it from an advice columnist. After all, she is a true believing zealot and zealots do not listen to reason. So MFS will need
to learn it from the real world. Is she willing to dump her current boyfriend
because he wants her to be monogamous or will she hold on to him and throw out
her Marxist-feminist ideology?

Instead, Featherstone offers a series of suggestions that tell
this woman to learn how to negotiate with a recalcitrant reality. And she tells
her that she will have to compromise. As I said, you might not like it, but,
under the circumstances Featherstone could not do much better at leading MFS
out of her ideological miasma and into the light.

She writes:

With your
new boyfriend, treat this as you would any other major difference you have
before settling down together: patiently and by tolerating some contingencies.
If you wanted to live on the noisiest corner in Bushwick and your partner was
happiest in rural Tennessee, you might take turns living in each other’s
preferred locale, finding unexpected delights there. Experiment with a period
of monogamy—remember, many people are most jealousy-prone early in a
relationship—on the condition that he agrees to consider other arrangements in
the future. Or perhaps some adventures are more acceptable to him than others.
(Group sex only? Dalliances that take place out of town? No exes or class
enemies?) If so, are you open to such compromises? And please attend closely to
the tone of these conversations—you need to be able to discuss your desires
with him without being made to feel immoral, disgusting, or greedy. If such
talks give you hope, hang in there! If not, he might not be your future baby
daddy.

Funny thing, when you read this you get the impression that MFS's desires are immoral, disgusting and greedy. As a rhetorical ploy, it has some merit.

I have long suspected that the current brouhaha over gender
dysphoria was producing more transgendered children. Since the means of
transmission would be cultural, not biochemical, we cannot simply run an
experiment to prove the point.

The more transgenderism is normalized and even glorified,
the more children will grasp it as it a solution to whatever anguish they feel.

He begins by suggesting that since children no longer seem
to want to rebel against authority, they are now rebelling against nature. What
good is political correctness if it does not teach you that dogma trumps facts and science?

He writes:

When we
think of teen rebellion in the modern era, we tend to think of a revolt against
authority. Think James Dean or Jack Kerouac in the 1950s. But many teens today
seem to be rebelling against something greater: nature.

I would add one caveat: today’s adults are increasingly
unwilling to exercise authority. A child cannot effectively learn science
and math or even historical facts if he does not respect authority—in this
case, a teacher’s authority. See my post about Lenore Chu’s experience of
having her children in school in Shanghai.

If children no longer respect authority they are taught the
art of self-discovery. How does it work? Today’s Platonists tell students that they
already know everything that is worth knowing, but that they need only to plumb
the depths of their minds. The self-discovery method is a powerful means of persuasion.
It tells students that they need not accept anyone’s authority, but need only
to introspect to discover innate ideas that are lying dormant in their minds,
awaiting an awakening.

Of course, this is rhetorical manipulation. In its more
radical form it’s called brainwashing. A child who suffers this
manipulation can come to believe that his inner truth is that he has always been a member of the
opposite sex. And that the belief has not been imposed on him by any adult
authority.

And yet, the idea is in the culture. Camille Paglia had
previously called it a sign of cultural collapse. Now, according to Miltimore,
she calls it a fashion or a fad. I think that she is downplaying the problem,
which more closely resembles mind control. Fashion is something you put on… for
favor or for fun. Transgender children believe that they really are the gender
they think they are.

Miltimore continues:

Gender
dysphoria, a condition described as
“strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and
discomfort with one's own assigned sex,” is quite common in young people today.

The
causes of gender dysphoria are “complex”
and “not
fully clear.” While many medical sites say gender dysphoria is caused by
hormonal imbalances, some scholars believe the rise in gender fluidity is
primarily a cultural phenomenon.

“I
think it’s become a fashion,” Camille Paglia said during a recent public
interview. “The transgender definition has become a convenient label for young
people who may simply feel alienated culturally for other reasons.”

Paglia,
a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and one
of the world’s foremost intellectuals, went on to suggest that gender
fluidity is simply the new face of the counter-culture.

What is called gender dysphoria is becoming more common. Its
presence corresponds well to the media mayhem over it. And also to the media
insistence that it is dogmatic truth, never to be questioned.

The statistics tell the story in Great Britain.

At the least, the statistics tell us that it cannot be
hormonal:

Could
the hormones of people living in the UK have changed that much in six years?
Almost certainly not. Medical experts told the BBC that “the growth in numbers
was likely to be due to greater awareness of gender identity issues.”

This
suggests the change indeed is cultural.

Pundits,
sociologists, doctors, and culture warriors can debate whether our culture is
confusing young people or simply allowing people to become who they are by
creating a more tolerant society—but it’s difficult to refute the idea that the
forces behind the rise in gender dysphoria cases are sociological.

The
question is, are teens capable—emotionally and intellectually—to make these
determinations on their own?

Easily the worst part of this cultural degradation
is the fact that children, as young as five years of age, are allowed to choose
their gender. On the basis of these decisions, be given puberty
blocking hormones, opposite sex hormones, and gender reassignment surgery.

I have already noted that I consider this to be child abuse.
And that any parent who contributes to this process should be prosecuted and
jailed.

Miltimore offers a similar view:

Children
under 18 can’t smoke a cigarette or get a tattoo. Children under 16 can’t
legally drive a car without supervision. Research suggests children
under 14 aren’t even capable of crossing a busy street without assistance. Yet
it is permissible to allow children to transition (in some cases as young
as age
4) to the sex they choose to be identified as?

If
Paglia is correct, and culturally alienated children are merely rebelling from
gender as part of a newer and darker counter-culture movement, does our society
not do them great harm by serving as their accomplice? I suspect
that Patrick
Mitchell and his mother would say we do.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn the British Labour
Party may or may not be making a comeback. It has been promoting a reactionary
platform calling to a return to pre-Thatcherite England, one that has little
chance of prevailing… were it not for the fact that Prime Minister Theresa May
seems to be yet another model of political ineptitude.

Need we mention that parties in power are supposed to
govern. They are supposed to get things done. They are not supposed to stand on
ideological conviction. Better something than nothing.

Anyway, today’s British Labour Party is a hotbed of
anti-Semitism. Who could have imagined that the international left is
fascistic? After all, we in America suffered through Jeremiah Wright’s protégé…
without recognizing that half of Barack Obama’s best friends are virulent
anti-Semites. Whether Wright or Farrakhan or William Ayers or Rashid Khalidi.

Richard Littlejohn reports what happened at an advertised side meeting
that took place during the recent Labour Party national conference.

It will not brighten your day or light up your life:

Holocaust
denial, virulent anti-Semitism and Zionist conspiracy theories are the sort of
dangerous, rabble-rousing poison you would expect from a neo-Nazi rally packed
with knuckle-scraping skinheads.

Most
people would not immediately associate this kind of vile behaviour with a
self-styled anti-racist party, allegedly committed to equality and diversity.

But
that’s exactly what has been on parade at this week’s Labour conference in
Brighton. The Fascist Left have been in full flow, monstering supporters
of Israel and demanding that members of the Jewish Labour
Movement should be expelled from the party.

Speakers
who compared ‘Zionists’ to Hitler’s genocidal Nazis were applauded by delegates
at an event advertised in the official conference handbook.

It was
even argued that questioning whether the murder of six million Jews during
World War II actually happened was a legitimate matter of free speech.

This
from activists who in other circumstances would be busily ‘no platforming’
anyone who expressed views which offended their own political sensibilities.

The fascist left… who would have thunk it? Where’s Antifa
when we need it?

Littlejohn continues:

Don’t
take my word for it, ask the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which
yesterday demanded that Corbyn expels all those who propagate anti-Semitic
sentiment.

Chief
executive Rebecca Hilsenrath said: ‘Anti-semitism is racism and the Labour
Party needs to do more to establish that it is not a racist party. A
zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism should mean just that.

‘When
senior party figures are saying there is a problem, then the leadership should
take swift action. It is not acceptable simply to say they oppose these views.

But, what about Corbyn himself? Littlejohn makes the case:

I’ve
always been prepared to concede that Corbyn doesn’t consider himself an
anti-Semite. Yet he counts among his ‘friends’ the likes of Hamas and
Hezbollah, whose sole purpose in life is wiping Jews off the face of the earth.

And
he’s prepared to countenance extremist, anti-Jewish views in his party, which
if expressed by Conservatives would have outraged Labour spokesmen demanding
they were arrested for ‘hate crimes’.

How did this happen? An alliance between the Far Left and
militant Islam has legitimized anti-Semitism:

Where
once Jew-baiting had been the sole preserve of the Far Right — the likes of
Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts — it is now primarily driven by an unholy alliance
between the Far Left and militant Islam.

Now that Merkelism has apparently-- and yet again-- ascended
in Germany, it’s interesting to see how other nations are dealing with the
refugee crisis provoked by President Obama’s mishandling of the war in Syria.

Before examining the problems posed by two million Syrian
refugees in Lebanon, we take a moment to reflect on the fact, as pointed out by
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, that Barack Obama deserves a major share
of the blame for what is happening in Syria. You will not hear anyone talking
about this, but that does not mean that it’s not true.

Since the world is now up in arms in the fight against
Nazis, especially the right wing groups that have formed in Germany and in
other parts of Europe in reaction to Merkelist policies, it is worthwhile to
examine the real enemy, the real threat to the civilization… and that would be
Muslim refugees.

The Daily Mail has a heartwarming story about a Syrian
refugee who was happy to repay the generosity shown him in Lebanon:

A
Syrian national identified only by his initials as BH is thought to have raped
and killed 26-year-old Lebanese national Rhea Chidiac inside her home in
northern Lebanon.

He came
to Lebanon three years ago and worked for the victim's family and had intended
to steal money from the house.

But
when he entered the family mansion and found Ms Chidiac alone, he allegedly
raped her and then suffocated her.

For reasons that can only bespeak bigotry, more and more
Lebanese citizens want to expel all Syrian refugees:

The
rape and murder has caused anger among residents towards Syrian refugees, who
came to Lebanon at the beginning of the Syrian war.

Despite
a small number trickling back to their home country just a few kilometres away
there are still an estimated 2 million in Lebanon.

Residents
of the northern town of Miziara have now called on the Lebanese authorities to
expel all displaced Syrians living in their town as unrest swept through the
northern town following the crime.

As opposed to American dreamers, these refugees are not
exactly the best and the brightest. One man wrote on social media:

'I
don't know why people are surprised that this is happening.'

'Most
of the Syrians who are now refugees or working as janitors, helpers, etc are
uneducated and have financial difficulties', one commented.

'Add to
that, years of civil war with no income, you've got yourself a recipe for
disaster', he added.

The
arrival of Syrian refugees into Lebanon has imposed huge economic and social
burdens on the country, according to Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri who
earlier in the year talked of a 'breaking point'.

Speaking
to foreign media Hariri said: 'Today, if you go around most of the host
communities, there is huge tension between the Lebanese and the Syrians.

'I fear
civil unrest.'

Most of the refugees are not working, but are living in
camps. They mostly live in informal camps across the country, some, in severe
poverty. The Daily Mail concludes:

Indeed,
it is that extreme poverty which is also to be blamed for the cases of
appalling crimes to be committed both within the refugee communities and
outside in the towns, where Syrian refugees are employed for as little as 6
pounds sterling a day.

According
to a report last year by a UK slavery organization, an alarming number of young
Syrian women were providing sexual favours to their bosses, whilst the study
also revealed that the majority of sex workers in Lebanon were Syrian
refugees.

The
study also exposed an alarming number of child workers who were leaving farms
to enter a world of sexual enslavement or forced marriage, often as young as
twelve years old.

We are happy to offer a modest proposal. Why not send them
all to Germany and to Sweden and other places that have opened their arms to
refugees.

If Germany is having problems with a million or so refugees,
in a population of 82,000,000 imagine the problem that Lebanon is having with
two million refugees in a population of 6,000,000.

We have often been told that we are suffering because we do
not see things through a woman’s eye. Apparently, all serious intellectual
disciplines would profit by the inclusion of more women.

Perhaps you doubt this statement. Perhaps you find it
vaguely sexist. Yet, yesterday Ann Althouse, a certified woman, offered us
her own special female thoughts on the NFL, take a knee movement.

As Althouse explains—I trust, with tongue in cheek—taking a
knee is sexist:

If you
wear a skirt (other than a very long skirt), you can't go down on one knee
without creating an upskirt view. It's interesting to me to see that photograph
taken with the woman in the short skirt in the most prominent position. She's
not in the taking-a-knee position, because she's down on both knees, for the
obvious reason. But I don't know how she managed to get into that position
without exposing whatever she's wearing under the skirt. Maybe she prepared and
— like a figure skater — donned some sort of exposable undershorts. I'm
thinking of something like this,
but even then, people are going to think it's not intended to be exposed. I'd
hate to find myself in some sort of work event — as a lawprof, I usually wore
an above-the-knee skirt — and expected to go along with a group activity that
put pressure on me to expose myself. It's a disparate burden with an element of
sexual harassment.

I trust that you already feel more enlightened. At least now
we know why no women are playing in the NFL. Speaking of sexism, if women can
be in the military, why shouldn’t they be on the field playing professional
football? I can sense the bigotry, can’t you?

Yes, I understand that if we tried to solve this problem by suggesting that women could take two knees, the image would evoke other associations, none of which are very flattering to women.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

One accepts, because one is very open minded, that the
New York Times has promoted itself as a leader of the Resistance against
President Donald Trump. Nothing quite like striking a blow for democracy by
extolling a disloyal opposition. One also accepts that the Times has
profited for propagandizing its coverage of the Trump administration. In
monetary terms Trump is the best thing that happened to the Times since Carlos
Slim bailed it out.

And yet, how to explain that the newspaper could be so brain
dead that it has taken to rationalizing Communism. One of the greatest and most
destructive political failures in human history, an abomination that has brought death, desolation and starvation everywhere it goes… is worthy of a rethink by
the New York Times.

In truth, the Times thinks that it is promoting feminism.
And it imagines that Communism liberated women. After all, none other than
Friedrich Engels promised that women’s lives would be better after the
Revolution. A while back, as dutifully
reported on this blog, the Times brought us the good news that women in
Bulgaria and East Germany had more orgasms while living in the abject misery
brought about by Communism. There wasn’t much bread and there certainly wasn’t
much cake, but women had orgasms galore.

Ready to return to those halcyon days? The Times never asked
why people in Eastern Europe and everywhere Communism had been tried will go to
very great lengths to forestall a return to the unmitigated horrors of
Communism.

Yesterday, Helen Gao wrote in the Times that Mao Zedong had
liberated women in China. Yes, indeed. If Gao had managed to take off her
feminist blinders she might have taken a
glance at Harrison Salisbury’s book, The
New Emperors. In it Salisbury describes how Mao sent his flunkies out into
the countryside to gather up a bevy of pretty girls. He would happily deflower
and rape a different one each evening… showing no concern for the fact that he was infecting them with an STD. Yes, indeed, Mao was great for women. (For the record, Salisbury was a distinguished journalist at... you guessed it... the New York Times.)

Here, without further ado, is Gao’s account. Upon presenting
it, we will move on to reality, to the facts, which can be found in prior
editions of the Times. Gao has no excuse for lying about Mao. Times editors
have no excuse for running propaganda for a regime that produced some of the
worst human catastrophes.

Gao is a true-believing ideologically committed feminist.
Her ideological blinders obscure her vision:

While
the Communist revolution brought women more job opportunities, it also made
their interests subordinate to collective goals. Stopping at the household
doorstep, Mao’s words and policies did little to alleviate women’s domestic
burdens like housework and child care. And by inundating society with rhetoric
blithely celebrating its achievements, the revolution deprived women of the
private language with which they might understand and articulate their personal
experiences.

Like Engels, Mao and his cronies were trying to seduce
Western women into joining the Communist cause:

When
historians researched the collectivization of the Chinese countryside in the
1950s, an event believed to have empowered rural women by offering them
employment, they discovered a complicated picture. While women indeed
contributed enormously to collective farming, they rarely rose to positions of
responsibility; they remained outsiders in communes organized around their
husbands’ family and village relationships. Studies also showed that women
routinely performed physically demanding jobs but earned less than men, since
the lighter, most valued tasks involving large animals or machinery were
usually reserved for men.

Gao does admit that women’s conditions did not exactly
fulfill the feminist dream:

Women
were shunted to collective neighborhood workshops with meager pay and dismal
working conditions, while men were more commonly employed in comfortable
big-industry and state-enterprise jobs. Party cadres’ explanations for this
reflected deeply entrenched gender prejudices: Women have a weaker constitution
and gentler temper, rendering them unfit for the strenuous tasks of operating
heavy equipment or manning factory floors.

If you can imagine such a thing, these newly empowered women
had to household chores along with their liberating careers:

The
party at times paid lip service to the equal sharing of domestic labor, but in
practice it condoned women’s continuing subordination in the home. In posters
and speeches, female socialist icons were portrayed as “iron women” who labored
heroically in front of steel furnaces while maintaining a harmonious family.
But it was a cherry-picking approach that focused exclusively on bringing women
into the work force and neglected their experiences in other realms.

And, somehow or other, these women were not treated as
equals in the factories. Call Sheryl Sandberg. She will know how to
solve a problem that is no doubt a mere remnant from feudal times:

Researchers
also observed that after marriage factory women often experienced slower career
advancement than men as they became saddled with domestic responsibilities that
left them with little time to learn new skills and take on extra work, both
prerequisites for promotion. State services that promised to ease their burden,
like public child care centers, were in reality few and far between. Unlike
their counterparts in developed countries, Chinese women didn’t have
labor-saving household appliances, since Mao’s economic policies prioritized
heavy industry over the production of consumer products like washing machines
and dishwashers.

But, despite it all, Communism advanced the feminist cause. That seems to be all that matters to Gao:

For all
its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big. When it
came to advice for my mother, my grandmother applauded her daughter’s decision
to go to graduate school and urged her to find a husband who would be
supportive of her career. She still seems to think that the new market economy
— with its meritocracy and freedom of choice — will finally allow women to be
masters of their minds and actions.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal James Freeman is
gobsmacked at the Times’s unwillingness to allow reality to undermine its
narrative. For an ideologue, the facts do not count. It’s the narrative uber alles.

Freeman counterpoints the Gao narrative with information that appeared in the Times itself. In truth, Mao's Communism produced
unmitigated horrors for the people who lived under it.

Freeman writes:

And
although Ms. Gao never mentions it, another Times contributor provided
important context in a 2010 op-ed. Frank Dikötter described the results of his research into previously
classified archives of local and national offices of China’s Communist Party:

In
all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible
for at least 45 million deaths.

Between
2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed,
often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough
were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds.
Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to
eat excrement.

One
report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely
including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped
off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilogram stone dropped on his
back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a
potato.

When
a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong
Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot.

That’s not all, folks. Freeman continues to give us a better
picture of the Great Famine that followed fast upon Mao’s Great Leap Forward:

In
“Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962,” Yang Jisheng meticulously
documents the suffering, including among women who probably dreamed that the
revolution could have somehow stopped before it reached their doorsteps. The
author interviewed Zhang Shengzhi, who had served as chair of a county women’s
federation in China before the party turned on her family. Many years later,
she recalled the experience:

My
grandmother and my elder sister starved to death. My sister was in Xi County and
died in November. She was left in her home and not buried. The reason was so
her family could continue collecting her ration of food, but the communal
kitchen had closed down in any case. She was buried the following February.
After being left out for several months, her face had been gnawed at by rats
and was unrecognizable.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Here’s a thoroughly modern issue
for you. It concerns Rachel and Rachel’s concerns for her long-term boyfriend’s
mental health. It comes to us from Charlotte Cowles in New York Magazine.

Here is the Cowles description of
the problem:

Rachel, 31, has been living with her long-term
boyfriend for over a year now, and suspects he may be depressed. He seems to
have lost interest in his job, his friends, his family, and her — and he’s been
drinking a lot, too. He admits that he feels stuck and unhappy, but when she
suggests professional help — a therapist — he says it’s too expensive. She
understands that it’s a financial reach, but she thinks his mental well-being —
not to mention their relationship — is well worth the cost. He’s a project
manager for a nonprofit and she’s a teacher, so they’re not exactly swimming in
extra cash, but they can’t go on like this. Would it help if she tried to
scrape together the money and paid for his initial sessions? How else can she
convince him that it’s “worth it”? What should she do?

This sounds a lot easier than it
is. Rachel and the experts believe that they need to
persuade BF to go to therapy. They believe that the problem is medical, that he
is ill, and thus, that they want what is best for him.

Armed with what they think is
science, they believe that they know what is best for other people. Apparently,
therapists excel in the art of persuading people to do something that they do
not want to do. Yet, the therapists tell Cowles that BF must really, really want to do therapy.

Dare I mention that if the
problem is medical and if it can be treated with a pill, the patient’s desires
are incidental. No one really believes that the flu shot will only work if you
want it to work. At least, we can hope so.

Of course, everyone is assuming
that the BF’s problems have no basis in reality. For all we know, this might be
true. He might have bipolar illness which is generally believed to be a
metabolic disorder, only treatable by medication… and thus, not a mental illness.

If that is the case, he ought to
be treated by a physician.

Yet, we do not know the truth. We
do, however, know that he is working at a nonprofit, thus at a politically
correct do-gooder organization that gives away money that other people have earned.
We know that he does not have a lot of money. And we know that he is pushing
back against a girlfriend who wants to tell him what to do.

We know nothing more about their
relationship. We assume that they are millennials living an egalitarian relationship.
If they cannot afford to see a therapist, can they afford to get married? Can
he, working at a nonprofit, support a family? I suspect that these questions
have never arisen. One might suggest that he should try changing careers, in
order to feel more… dare I say it… manly.

My initial reaction to this
letter was: perhaps Rachel is the one who needs therapy. How much he she
contributing to his depression? Does she talk down to him, treat him like a
child, oblige him to be her equal?

None of the experts ask whether Rachel is the problem or the solution. To me that suggests she is part of the problem. Has she beaten him down to the point that the only way he
can assert his self-respect is to refuse to do what she is telling him to do.

A lot of people are trying to get
him to do something he does not want to do. They are disrespecting him, trying
to make him into a patient, and consigning him to the tender mercies of someone
who is most likely female, most likely a feminist and most likely to try to
talk him out of his last shred of manliness. Even if he does consult with a
male therapist, the chances are good that the therapist will be a feminist and
will tell him to get in touch with his feelings and give up his last shred of
manliness.

America is suffering through an opioid epidemic. By now we
all know that the fault lies with the pharmaceutical manufacturers who are
producing and marketing them, with the physicians who are prescribing them
willy-nilly and with the government regulators who offered blanket approval
for the pills.

If we dig a little deeper into the numbers, as Allyssia Finley
does, we discover that many of these prescriptions are being given to people
who are covered by Medicaid. In particular, to those who live in states that
accepted the Medicaid expansion offered by Obamacare. One reason it is
so difficult to repeal and replace Obamacare is that it increases the level at
which people can qualify for Medicaid to something like three or four times the
poverty level. At that point, the number of those covered rises exponentially.
They might not be getting very good medical care, but they have been getting
more opioids.

Finley explained:

…
government health-care programs are among the biggest suppliers of prescription
painkillers. The attorneys general ought to be investigating how Medicaid may
help promote opiate abuse and addiction.

Wisconsin
Sen. Ron Johnson this summer highlighted a correlation between the ObamaCare
Medicaid expansion and opioid overdoses. Data from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention show that overdose deaths per capita rose twice as much
on average between 2013 and 2015 in states that expanded Medicaid than those
that didn’t—for example, 205% in North Dakota, which expanded Medicaid, vs. 18%
in South Dakota, which didn’t. That’s particularly striking since the energy
boom boosted North Dakota’s economy and employment.

ObamaCare
defenders note that the disparity in overdose fatalities appears to have begun
around 2010—but due largely to sharp increases in a few expansion states, most
notably West Virginia. What’s more, the disaggregated data show that the
disparity between expansion and nonexpansion states with similar demographics
and geography increased markedly after 2013. Between 2010 and 2013, overdose
deaths rose by 28% in Ohio and 36% in Wisconsin. Between 2013 and 2015, they
climbed 39% in Ohio, which expanded Medicaid, but only 2% in Wisconsin, which
did not.

Why do Medicaid patients receive more opioids? Because they
receive substandard treatment.

Finley wrote:

For
one, Medicaid patients may be more likely to be prescribed opioids—twice as
likely, according to two
studies, as privately insured individuals. A recent study by Express Scripts Holding found that
about a quarter of Medicaid patients were prescribed an opioid in 2015.

State
Medicaid programs also favor generics over more expensive branded painkillers
with abuse-deterrent formulas. According to the Express Scripts study, generics accounted for 90% of Medicaid opioid
medication claims. Large doses of oxycodone, methadone and fentanyl can be
obtained cheaply with a Medicaid card and resold for a nice profit on the black
market. Sen. Johnson’s review of recent open-source court files and news
articles turned up 261 defendants who had been convicted of improperly using
Medicaid cards to obtain prescription opioids.

Many
states in recent years have set up databases to identify patients at risk for
abuse based on the number of prescriptions they fill and pharmacies they visit.
But often providers, particularly in emergency rooms where many Medicaid
patients seek treatment, don’t have time to check the databases, examine
patients for abuse, perform follow-up consultations, or consider alternative
analgesics or physical therapy….

Many
primary-care providers won’t see Medicaid patients because of the low
reimbursement rates, so emergency rooms have been inundated with patients. The
wait to see a specialist can last months. Many Medicaid beneficiaries suffering
from pain or substance abuse may not be getting the treatment they need.

The Medicaid recipients who are now militating against any
changes to Obamacare are not receiving quality medical care. In many cases they
are not receiving medical care at all. They receive painkillers.

At least, they are being entrepreneurial. They are selling
the pills on the black market, the better to share the benefits of Obamacare.

Monday, September 25, 2017

Ever on the lookout for glimpses
into therapy, I am grateful to the attentive reader who just sent me this excerpt from New York Magazine’s “Sex Diaries.” The reader prefers to remain anonymous. You will understand why.

Here, it’s all in the
juxtaposition. We witness a young woman’s journey from her therapist’s office to home
care. We get to see how therapy leads to happiness.

One appreciates that the writer, who has never had a relationship and has
only on the rarest of occasions been on a date, is discussing these matters
with her therapist. She might also be discussing her first experience with
BDSM, but perhaps not.

She has been doing therapy for
over six years. Since she is 23… do the math.

Here is what happens in her
therapy session:

8:15
p.m. At
my therapist’s. I’ve been seeing him for over six years. The past year we’ve
almost exclusively worked on my relationships with men, specifically my
tendency to put pressure on guys in order to get some relationship or sign that
they like me. Unsurprisingly, that hasn’t worked for me in the past. Lately
I’ve gotten a lot better at taking a step back and letting relationships run
their course.

Then, here is what she does afterwards, when she gets
home and wants to wind down after what was surely an intense therapy session. (Trigger Warning: this is decidedly NSFW):

10 p.m. I get home from therapy and text the
Dom a photo of my butt plug. I turn on some porn, lube up my butt plug, and use
my vibrator. It is amazing. I fall asleep happy.

You see, therapy has given her a pathway to happiness. I
trust that her story brightens your day.

A deluded adventure junky named Emma Kelty set out to find
herself by kayaking solo down the 4,000 mile long Amazon river. She was told that it was
dangerous. She was told that she would probably be killed. She was impervious to advice. She did it anyway.

Don’t we all know that we can only find ourselves by testing
our limits? Don’t we know that we are all alone in the world and that we must
learn how to subsist as independent, autonomous individuals? Isn’t it the most
therapeutic exercise imaginable… being a woman who conquered the Amazon?

Daily Mail writer Rachel Johnson has a few salient thoughts
on Emma Kelty:

I
have become mildly obsessed by the horrible fate of Emma Kelty – the
43-year-old former headmistress murdered by river pirates on the Amazon – for
reasons that will soon become clear.

I can’t
decide: is she a great British heroine cut off in her prime, who wanted to add
‘longest solo kayaking journey ever undertaken by a woman’ to her impressive
list of lifetime achievements?

Or was
she a selfish nutter on a suicide mission, addicted to the adrenaline and
attention generated by a life dedicated to one thing: adventure?

No
challenge had ever defeated this daredevil ex-soldier, who relaxed by
kickboxing, abseiling, running up mountains, turning round schools, skiing to
the South Pole, or hiking across America.

I am slightly more confident than Johnson. Kelty was a fool
and she paid for her foolishness.

The
late Emma Kelty was clearly made of sterner stuff. But still. Everyone told her
she was doomed, even though she already knew. ‘It’s stupid, it’s too dangerous,
it’s too risky and I will die,’ she admitted.

On the
trip, she blogged: ‘The world is huge and so much more to explore. I wish that
others would join me on this way of life.’

No
thanks. Especially not after what happened to Emma: attacked by a gang with
machetes, tortured, and thrown into the river.

There
is a fine line between brave and foolhardy.

I’m
afraid she crossed it on this epic and tragic journey in search of herself.

Prior to her death she stopped in the village of Sao
Joao de Catua on the Solimoes river before embarking on the feared stretch
of river after Coari, 100km upstream.

Resident
Miliane Vincente told Mailonline they
had warned her of the dangers.

"We
saw her passing by and called her into the community. I told her it was very
dangerous, that it was full of drug trafficking and terrorists," she said.

"I
took her to my house and gave her water to drink, and we talked as she showed
me her photos. I told her to go with us in our boat to Coari so she wouldn't be
in danger.

"I
still remember her last words: I can't stay, the more time I stay here the more
time I'm losing. For me to succeed I have to do this route. Your hearts are
very kind, but I have to carry on."

The Telegraph tells what happened to Emma Kelty:

The
man, who didn't want to be named, said: "He said he was one of four men.
The woman had put up her tent on the beach in exactly the area where the
Colombia drug traffickers go through, and which is crawling with pirates who
wait for them to arrive to attack.

"These
men aren't pirates though, they are just drug users. We are all shocked that
these men from our community did such a terrible thing to this woman.

"When
the men saw her tent they thought it belonged to a Colombian with drugs, so
they started firing from about 50 metres away. The woman was hit in the arm.
She started waving frantically and screaming for help."

He said
that when the four men saw that she was a woman they attacked her and, still
believing she was carrying drugs, cut off her hair with a knife while demanding
to know where the drugs were.

According
to the man, one of the group then slit her through with the knife, before all
four men "sexually abused her".

He said
they then dragged her body to the river and dumped it in the fast-moving water.

He
said: "The men fled into the forest after we all found out what they had
done. We provided the police with the details and their identities. We're all
disgusted by what they have done."